Lasting Legacy
by Rae Kelly
Summary: George Washington Carver gave the world peanut butter. Thomas Edison left us the light bulb. The Wright brothers gave us the airplane. What kind of legacy did one quiet man leave?
1. Chapter 1

She walked slowly into the old building that should have been condemned many years ago, long before she had even been born. As her fingers traced lightly along the top of the desk by the front door memories flooded her mind┘memories of her childhood friends, some who were gone now and many that she had lost contact with. The old ledger book where the lodgers had signed in lay open on the counter in the same place that it had always sat. A row of dusty ledgers sat on the shelf behind the desk...one for each of the more than twenty-five years that the lodging house had been open. The jar where the lodgers had dropped the money for their lodging now stood empty except for a broken button that someone had dropped in there several years before. Kloppman had never taken it out, feeling certain that the culprit would come forward later and give him the nickel lodging fee.

In the corner by the old stove brought forth so many memories. She had slept there as a baby and the young lodgers had often huddled there for warmth after a long day on the streets during the winter. She and her young friends had helped Racetrack pick a last name by rolling a die there in that same corner. Spot had been mad at the younger boy for winning a penny from him at a cockfight and had been the one to suggest Higgins as a last name. Chance had it that the clearly Italian boy would end up with an Irish last name instead of an Italian one. She also recalled one night when they had stayed up well past their normal bedtime telling each other ghost stories only to become too frightened to sleep. Cap had kindly allowed them all to bring their blankets into his room and sleep on the floor.

The rickety old table where many poker games had been played still stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by the same mismatched old chairs that had been there when she was a child. How many games of poker had she and her friends secretly played while hiding under that table? How many conversations had they eavesdropped on when the older boys forgot that they were in the room because they had been hidden under that same table? How many forts had they made by throwing their blankets over the table?

She moved slowly into the kitchen and smiled as she remembered the one and only food fight in history of the old building. There had never been any food to waste for the occupants of the building, and there hadn't been on that occasion. She, Spot and Jack had received a good scolding for wasting that food and she had gotten a spanking. The man who had raised her had never spanked any of the boys, but on that occasion he had threatened to.

The large table had only seen shared meals on special occasions when people such as the Roosevelts had brought food to these forgotten children. But it had seen many nightmares silently shared over a mug of warm milk┘and had the nightmare been especially bad, a small bit of chocolate sometimes found its way into the milk.

The next stop on her tour of memories was a small room of the kitchen┘a closet really. It had been her first bedroom, and here that she first met Jack. He had crawled through the window trying to get away from Snyder, the warden at the Refuge. She had made fun of his real name and that night Francis Sullivan died and Jack Kelly had been born. In a rare moment of kindness for her at that age, she had offered to share her last name with him. A few years later she had wondered what had possessed her to make such an offer.

She turned and went back to the front room before climbing the ancient stairs. The voices of boys racing down the stairs and out the door seemed to echo through the old building. Pausing for a moment, she carefully sat on the top step. Many conversations had been eavesdropped upon from this very spot and it was here that she had made the decision to leave her Manhattan home and move to Brooklyn with Spot. She could still hear Jack's voice on that night as he told the story of his escape from the Refuge with the help of none other than Teddy Roosevelt. Had she stayed in Manhattan she might never have met the man who was now her husband.

Sighing softly, she stood and made her way down the hallway to the last room she had occupied when she lived here. Shortly after Jack first arrived at the lodging house she had insisted that she was old enough to use the second small bedroom upstairs. Looking back on it now, she knew they had done it just to humor her and because they knew that they would not get any peace until they did. She stepped inside and was surprised to find that the room hadn't changed much at all. The only thing missing was the old rocking chair that had once stood in the middle of the room. Kloppy had given it to her nearly two years ago when her daughter had been born.

Hearing the delighted squeal that only a toddler could give, she walked over to the window and looked outside to where Beau and Hannah waited. He tossed their daughter in the air and she squealed again. Hannah had them both wrapped around her little finger, but especially her daddy whose black hair and dark eyes she had inherited. They had always considered Hannah a blessing, but even more so in the last few months since they had lost their second daughter. Little Mary had been stillborn.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when a hand rested lightly on her shoulder, but settled when she heard the familiar voice. "You know┘I'm not old enough to be a grandfather," he told her, as he so often had. She felt some comfort at the familiar words. The man who raised her often teased her with those words, though he doted on Hannah like any adoring grandfather would.

She turned to look up at him, her face stained with tears she hadn't realized that she had been shedding. "Oh Cap┘I still can't believe he's really gone." The news of Kloppman's death had hit her hard a few days before and even now she still found it hard to believe.

He wrapped his arms around her in a gentle hug. "He was old when I first met him twenty-five years ago. He was ready to go." Kloppman had been the only father he had ever known and he missed the old man. But he also knew the man had been hiding his illness from his "boys" for several years.

She clung to him for several minutes, needing the comfort only her father's arms could offer. "What happens now?" she asked, her head still resting on his shoulder. "What happens to the boys living here?"

He sighed deeply. "They were all sent to find other places to live." He would have gladly taken them all in if he could, and he was confident that she knew that. But right now it just wasn't possible for him to do that. He could afford it, but the children he and his wife had in their care now were hard enough to deal with, without adding another two dozen to their number┘two dozen boys who had been on the streets, some for several years, and would not easily adjust to having a real guardian once again.

"That's not fair, Cap┘isn't there someone else to take over for Kloppy? What is going to happen to this building?" Kloppy had spent most of his life running the lodging house out of that building. It wasn't fair for it to be closed now.

"They are going to tear it down next week," he told her. He understood how she felt, but there was nothing he could do. The building had been condemned for a couple years now, but the old man had somehow convinced the city to keep from destroying it until his death. "Kloppman may be gone, honey, but those of us who knew him will always have a little part of him inside of us." When her gaze traveled back out the window to watch her husband and daughter, he left her alone with her thoughts.

She reached out and touched the window. Not all of the boys that Kloppman had taken it turned out well, but most of them had done alright for themselves. One had gone on to be a newspaper reporter that had helped the newsies during their strike. His younger brother had become a doctor who was giving his life to serve the underprivileged in Brooklyn. Cap had not only formally adopted her and her older brother, but also their two younger brothers when they had been found. He had also taken in the family of the young man she would later marry after they moved to Brooklyn when their father died. Cap was right┘Kloppy would live on in each of the children he had invested his life into. Their lives, and the lives of their children, were a fitting legacy for the old man. 


	2. Chapter 2

Life as a newsie hadn't been as wonderful as he imagined it would be when he left home. But then he had been a child looking for adventure...and in his ten-year-old mind, nothing could be more exciting and adventurous as joining the ranks of the newsies. He was bored with school and taking care of his younger brother, so leaving his parents a note while they were at work and telling his brother to stay put, he had left home.

Of course, he also hadn't counted on his younger brother following him. Try as he might, he had not been able to convince his stubborn younger brother to go back home. So together they left home, never looking back. Those first few days had been hard. Not knowing any better they spent what little money they had taken with them on food that first night. And then there was the issue of lodging. Just where did a newsie sleep at night? They had managed to find an empty crate in an alley that they curled up in for warmth. Thankfully they weren't on the streets for too long before someone pointed them in the direction of the Duane Street lodging house. The house on Duane Street was fairly new and had room for more lodgers, though it was in Manhattan, far from their Brooklyn home. Once there they were taken in by the kind older man who ran the house and taken under the wing of Daniel, a boy two years his senior who taught them the finer points of selling papers and how to manage the few coins they earned every day.

It hadn't taken long for the excitement and the adventure to wear off. They rose before dawn to make their way to the newspaper office and distribution center to buy their papers for the day. He and his brother sold both the morning and evening editions, some days getting back to the lodging house well after dark. Many days they had to fight for the corner they had claimed to sell their papers. For a newsie, territory was the most important thing they had. No matter what the headlines, if you had a good corner to sell on you could always sell your papers to the regulars. Their corner wasn't the best, but in the early days people had a hard time resisting his little brother when the pint-sized boy gave them his most pitiful look and started coughing. It seemed the weather was always against them as well. But no matter what the weather they were out there selling their papers...just as faithful as the mail men. The summer heat and the winter frost often caused sickness among the newsies, and sometimes even death.

On some days they had to come up with ways to pass the long hours on the streets while selling their papers. So he began making up stories about the people they saw to entertain his brother, whose attention span was rather short. Some of the other boys heard of the stories and began asking him to tell them at night. Soon his stories became a nightly tradition and he began to long to write them down to remember them. Then one day a tablet had been left on his bunk and though he never knew for sure, he suspected that it had been the old man who ran the lodging house that had left it for him.

When he grew bored with making up his stories, he would take a paper home with him at night and read the articles and then rewrite them in a way that he thought was better. He found that he actually enjoyed doing it. Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, he left his tablet at a diner where he had stopped for lunch. When he returned later that day it was gone. Somehow the tablet, on which he had so carefully penned his name and the address of the lodging house, made it into the hands of one of the senior editors of the New York Sun. A few days later the editor had shown up at the lodging house, offering him a job as a typesetter and the opportunity to go back to school. And thus a newsie named Bryan began his journey to becoming an Ace War Correspondent. All because an old man saw his talent and bought him a simple tablet.


	3. Chapter 3

She had never intended to be a newsie. But then one can never really plan the direction their life takes, can they? She had never planned for her mother to die in a factory accident. She had never planned for her father to be killed.

Of course, since when did anyone's plans go as anyone had actually planned them? Life was full of broken ideas, and street life did not allow for any notion of a mapped out life. Plans changed, and the new, crudely drawn map led her straight to the lodging house's doorstep.

When she had first arrived at the lodging house the day after her father's death, she merely tossed the carpetbag of things she had taken from their flat under her bed without bothering to look at the things she had grabbed during her hasty flight from the only home she had ever known. The room she occupied was shared with two younger girls that she couldn't stand from the moment she stepped into the room. The younger one was a demanding little brat while the older one followed her around chattering nonstop. After a week she had slipped something into the girl's food that caused her to start throwing up...then she left the girl in that alley near the lodging house. Yes, she knew it was cruel, but having to listen to the constant chatter of that ten-year-old had been torture. She didn't want to make friends or be accepted, she just wanted to be left alone until she could afford to move on.

A few months later she looked under her bed for her coat and found the old bag. She pulled it out and began to rummage through it. There were a few items of clothing that she hadn't really seemed to miss much. Under the clothing was a silver brush and mirror set that had belonged to her mother...the nicest things her mother had owned. She removed them from the bag and held them lovingly for a few moments before setting them aside and continuing.

She kept the things that had belonged to her mother, but couldn't bring herself to keep the things that had belonged to her father. Upon her mother's death she had learned the truth about her father. He had been a thief and confidence man and apparently not very good at it. If he had been good at it then her mother would not have been forced to work in the factory that had killed her and they would not have been living in that tiny, filthy flat in Hell's Kitchen.

Among the things she had tossed out was a small black bank book that he had given her, telling her only to open it after his death. He had told her that it was an account that he had set up in her name in case something happened to him. She didn't want his stolen money...she wanted her mother back.

The next few years were spent avoiding the newsies that she lived with and in doing so created herself a reputation as somewhat of an "ice queen". In fact, they all stopped calling her Hattie and began using the nickname Ice. It didn't help that her eyes were a cool icy grey color and that her once fiery red hair was now mostly silver with only a few streaks of the old glorious color. But she wore her hair as a badge of honor for her own mother's hair had turned silver at a very early age.

A few short weeks before her eighteenth birthday one of the newsies had approached her, something which hadn't happened often in her years at the lodging house. His idea had been highly unusual, though simple. He had no family and she had no family, so they should get married and become a family. Plus it would save them both money since they would both be leaving the lodging house soon and needed places to live. She still was not sure what possessed her to agree to such a plan.

But agree she had and just an hour before they had left the lodging house, the old man had come to her with a small black book. He had found it when she had thrown it out and thought she might change her mind about it later, so he had kept it safe for her until now. Part of that money had gone to pay off her new husband's gambling debts a few months later after his loan shark had attacked her. Now her father's dirty money was paying their rent and restoring the tenement building they had been living in until it had been destroyed by fire a few months before.

Not only was it paying the rent for her husband, herself and their two young sons, but also for several of their other old newsie friends who had been living in the same building. And for the first time since her mother had died, a young woman named Hattie had a family and felt that she belonged. All because an old man knew better than to allow a young girl to throw away a small black bank book in anger. 


	4. Chapter 4

He had stumbled onto the newsies when he was about eight years old...quite literally. He had been placed into the House of Refuge after his father had been sent to prison. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that he had learned that the word refuge meant a shelter or safe haven. The House of Refuge had been far from that.

He somehow managed to escape just a few days after his eighth birthday. Snyder, the warden, had chased him through the dark streets of lower Manhattan. He had run until he thought his legs felt like rubber and his lungs were burning...and just has he thought he wasn't going to be able to keep moving, he had turned into an alley and the moon shone down on an open window on the first floor of a dilapidated old building.

Crawling through the window, he had startled a young girl his own age. The feisty little creature had stood there glaring at him, wearing a man's shirt and her hair had been sleep tangled. After hearing that he had been running from Snyder, her attitude had changed and she had been the one to talk him into becoming a newsie. She had even helped him change his name by offering to share her last name with him.

He didn't worry about Snyder for another few years...in fact; he had almost forgotten that he was indeed an escaped criminal. None of his friends knew the truth about him. He had them all convinced that his parents had gone to Santa Fe to buy a ranch and would send for him as soon as they could.

The truth was that he didn't remember his mother and his father had been a thief and had taught him to steal. He didn't remember not knowing how to steal, honestly. But then one day when he was almost eight, he and his father had gotten caught. His father had been sent out to Riker's Island and he had been sent to the Refuge.

He had been twelve when the depression hit. Kloppman had done what he could to help out the children living in his lodging house, but all he could really do was not charge them the normal nickel fare for their lodging. However, he couldn't afford to feed the newsies who were barely selling any papers at all. Then one day he had seen a small loaf of bread roll off a vendor's cart in the market. He had dropped his papers and bent down to pick it up, hoping the vendor wouldn't see. Instead he had been caught and sent back to the Refuge.

A year later he had escaped from the Refuge once more, only this time with the help of then governor Teddy Roosevelt. When he got back to the lodging house, they had listened as he told his tale, but he wasn't too sure they believed him. They had at least pretended to believe him until during the strike when it came out that his father was in prison and not in Santa Fe has he had been telling them.

He had done such a good job convincing them that he had almost convinced himself that his parents were in Santa Fe waiting for him. The whole lie was Kloppman's fault anyway. As a boy Kloppman had taught him to read from the old dime westerns. They had gotten him started dreaming of Santa Fe. He had snuck the novels along with him any time he left the house, devouring them any chance he had. The novels allowed him to forget the truth about his family and lsoe himself in another world.

One day the young newsies had been talking about their pasts and the story had slipped so easily from his lips. And it sounded much better than the truth...much better than the stories the other children told. Rae had been left at the lodging house as a baby. Spot's father had killed his mother and gotten away with it because he was a cop. Race's father had dumped him at the tracks when he could no longer afford to keep the boy. Blink's father had told the boy to leave when the rest of the family took sick. Mush's vaudville family had left him behind without an explanation.

Then, as if encouraging him to continue the lie, the little presents that Kloppman would occasionaly buy the newsies merely added to his dreams. Over the years the old man had bought him a cowboy hat, numerous bandanas and a rope with a book of lasso tricks that he managed to teach himself. And so because of a fiesty little girl sharing her name and a kind old man's gifts Francis Sullivan died and Jack "Cowboy" Kelly was born and became somewhat of a legend among the newsies. All because an old man shared his love of western novels with a young criminal. 


	5. Chapter 5

He had always been on the streets. His mother had been a performer on the stage in some of the more shady establishments in Manhattan. She went from one theatre to the next as often as she went from one man to another. Because he had nothing better to do while he mother was busy on the stage or with one of her boyfriends, he took to the streets. It had started when he was four when he would simply walk around the outside of the theatre in sheer boredom. By the age of six he was selling newspapers because his mother often forget to feed him or to give him money for food.

A few years later his mother had news for him one afternoon. Her latest boyfriend was taking a group of actresses on a tour and he wanted her to go. However, the boyfriend wouldn't allow him to come along. He had merely shrugged his shoulders and told her to have a good time. He still loved his mother, but it had been a long time since she had acted like a mother.

He had managed alright living on the streets by himself until winter hit. After catching a nasty cold, he stumbled around in the snow,  
determined to still keep working...he had no choice really. If he wanted to eat, he had to keep working. So he couldn't afford to be sick. He had kept going until dropped in the doorway of an old building one night,  
unable to move any more. Vaguely he remembered someone carrying him into the building and tucking him into a bed.

When he woke a few days later he found himself in the home of an older couple. They asked him several questions and when they found out that he had no home, they opened their home to him. They had spent their savings to buy the old building in hopes of using it to help the street children of Manhattan. But until they had found him on their doorstep, they had not known how to help. With his arrival, the decision was made. They would open a lodging house for newsboys and he was to be their first lodger.

The new few years were happy ones for him. The old couple treated him like a beloved grandson rather than a lodger. The small group of orphans and runways that lived there were like an extended family, something he had always longed for.

Then early one morning the old man woke him with tears in his eyes. His wife had died peacefully in her sleep. As soon as he could, the thirteen-year-old found a quiet place to cry. He hadn't cried when his mother left him years before, but this woman had been more of a mother than his own had ever been.

His life changed again a few months later when a tiny baby girl had been left on the very doorstep where he had collapsed many years before. He had lost his heart from the moment he first he looked into her gray eyes. Two night later, unable to sleep, he had slipped downstairs to check on the baby. Sitting beside the basket where she slept in front of the fire he had poured his heart out to her, telling her that he hoped that she never had to feel unwanted the way he had. The next morning Kloppman announced that they would be keeping the baby, and from then on he had taken it upon himself to be the one responsible for her care.

And what a time he had raising her...and then later the other children who had come to live at the lodging house. He and his friends had never been as much trouble to Kloppman as Rae and her friends had been to him.  
There had been many time when he wanted to throw the whole lot of them off in the river. But then he guessed it was probably like that for any parent.

When he was old enough he had gotten a job with the prestigious Pinkerton Detective Agency. He assumed that it was probably because of his years on the streets and the connections he had there. When the World's Fair came in Chicago in 1893, he was one of the one's chosen to go for extra security. He had wanted to adopt the little girl he had been raising, but there were too many factors standing in his way to do so then...so he went to Chicago without her. For the first few months,  
they had exchanged letters regularly, but then slowly their letters stopped altogether.

His trip lasted much longer than he had intended and when he returned home, she was gone. He went straight to her best friend, who lied to him about her whereabouts. When he finally found her, she told him that she never wanted to see him again and promptly ran from the city. As soon as he heard of her disappearance again, he went right out and adopted not only her, but an older brother she had found while he was gone. He sent the adoption papers to her for her birthday a few years later after she had returned.

When he was younger he never would have imagined that he, Daniel "Cap"  
Cole would adopt not only the little girl he had raised but also her three brothers. Nor would he have imagined that he would take in his daughter's fiance and his many siblings, giving them all a chance to better themselves. He never would have imagined that he would give up rather good position at the Agency to start his own school for those children he took in and a special other few. And it was all because an old man didn't allow him to freeze on a doorstep, but took him in and gave him a chance at life. 


	6. Chapter 6

It's strange to say something started out with me simply sticking my tongue out, but that's how it happened, plain and simple. I was three, so it was the only way to tell the strange boy that he wasn't welcome in my neighborhood, even if his mother happened to be buying a paper from my father figure. That mattered little to me, yet, as he returned the favor with a wrinkle in his face, we instantly became friends. I laugh when I think how it was the first time Cap had allowed me to accompany him selling, how I'd been begging, pleading, and throwing tantrums up until that day. Yet, it was only then that I was allowed to follow behind him, in charge of his pennies. It was my first real job, before I could even tie my shoelaces, and he was my first friend which would last long after I learned how to properly dress myself.

I didn't know it then, though as a child you don't notice such things, but the little boy and his demure little mother were stuck in the same situation so many other street families seemed to be caught in. This was a time when men were men, and men were alcoholics who squandered what earnings they did make and blamed their families for stealing the money needed to feed themselves. He showed up on the lodging house doorstep one evening with a bruise across his face, he bright blue eyes bloodshot. I suppose I'd cry too if my father had killed my mother in a fit of rage. In the two years I had known him up to this point he never showed signs that such a thing could happen, and in the years after he refused to talk about it.

We were inseparable the next several years, even when other boys our age moved into the lodging house. About once a week, the two of us would walk back to the building where he had lived with his parents and he would climb the fire escape and peek into the window. He never told me what he saw but he was always quiet when we walked home. Thinking back on it now, I know that he was thinking about his mother and how much he missed her. I imagine that is how the boy from Neverland felt when he watched the Darling children at play in their nursery.

Like Peter Pan and Wendy, we got ourselves into considerable trouble, working against the adults of New York like they were evil pirates. With those sorts of thoughts in our heads, stealing was for the common good and picking fights was necessary. Troublemakers didn't quite seem to cover what we had become, and, I hate to say it now, but Cap was nearing his wit's end with the pair of us. He always sent us warnings about how we were going to bite off more than we could chew, and like the pack of brats we were, we ignored him. However, as predicted, one day we went too far.

Cap had given us money to see a play in Brooklyn, perhaps to get out of his hair as I think, before twenty-five, I was already making him gray. Five of us hitched on a few trolleys and walked the rest of the way, chatting like we were invincible. So invincible, in fact, that when we saw the little boy in the play announce he could lick any kid in town, well, we took personal offense. This was our turf, and we had a score to settle, and outside the stage door we decided to settle it all over that boy's face. Unfortunately, we weren't the ones with the last word as we were dragged back to the lodging house by the police, leaving us in the company of an irate Cap.

He, for lack of a better term, gave me what Paddy gave the drum, and the next day decided to take Liam to the Brooklyn docks to be straightened out as he had officially hit his end with the pair of us. We were only separated by the East River, but to children our age it might as well have been the whole Atlantic. It took me a while, well into my late teen years in fact, to forgive Cap for sending my friend away, particularly after Liam had come back a few weeks later in a desperate attempt to renegotiate. I can still see his bruised and bloodied face, the result of an argument with the Brooklyn leader of the time, Cork. Even then, even looking at the virtually unrecognizable face of my best friend, Cap refused to allow him to come back. I believe then a rift started between myself and Liam that still comes to play now that we've long since grown.

Cap's job took him to Chicago when I was almost twelve and after nearly a year of waiting for the only parent I had ever known to return, I left my Manhattan home and traveled to Brooklyn to see my old friend Liam. I needed to be near someone who understood the abandonment I was feeling. Three years later Liam returned to the lodging house, after having disappeared for several days, with the news that he was married. He had gotten a girl pregnant and his father and her father had forced them to get married, even though they were both fairly young. Things between us became strained because his young wife was extremely jealous of the friendship that we shared…a bond only another street child could understand.

Over the next three years I found my own little flat, reconciled with Cap and moved into his house, and met a wonderful man and married him. Near the time of the birth of our first child I heard news that Liam's wife had died. I had kept up with my old friend through other former newsies and knew that he had been drinking heavily for some time before the death of his wife and knew that things would only get worse for him. As I watched him from a distance at the funeral, so drunk that he was barely able to stand with his adorable toddler son standing at his feet, I made up my mind to offer to take care of the boy until Liam could get his life straight again. I knew that Beau wouldn't mind and had started to go to my old friend when an older couple approached him. The woman picked up the child and carried him away, kicking and screaming. Liam merely hung his head and turned to walk away. I had never been more outraged with my childhood pal, letting his wife's parents take his son from him that way.

It's been two years since that day and my old friend is still drinking his life away. His poor little son is growing up not knowing his father and being raised by his grandparents. If Liam would stop drinking and get sober and clean his life up, he could get his son back. And maybe one day Liam "Spot" Conlon could regain his title of King of Brooklyn.


End file.
